The Post-English English

Abstract

The relation of english to other language-oriented departments, though dense with complexity, is rarely talked about in the open. One explanation for the lack of discussion may be the difficulty of framing a relation that is moving in two directions at once: while over the last generation or so English and the so-called foreign languages have come to resemble each other in substance, they have grown apart in material resources and institutional prestige. Many departments of English are more or less thriving, while departments of other languages and literatures in the same places are depleted and struggling. And yet, in the view of many of the people who determine our condition—administrators, legislators, and students—we are largely all of a piece; my problems will soon be yours, yours will be mine, and scholars and teachers of literature will find that they have far more joining than dividing them. To revive one of the rubrics of our New York University conference, we literary scholars are much better at collating the many ways we are different than identifying and leveraging the ways we are the same. How much does our declining influence in academy and society owe to an incapacity to come together and announce our identity when it matters? I take the position that we now have an ethical obligation to do what inclination and training have so badly prepared us for: to measure our sameness and difference on one scale and talk about what we can do together. How can people in English departments address this condition? What might those in other literature departments do? Having spent a career moving between these settings, I offer some reflections.